History: NASA Archive Photography

Public perception of the NASA budget may be very different from reality and has been the subject of controversy since the agency's creation.
A 1997 poll reported that Americans had an average estimate of 20% for NASA's share of the federal budget. In reality, NASA's budget has been between 0.5% and 1% from the late 1960s on.
NASA budget briefly peaked at over 4% of the federal budget in the mid-1960s during the build up to the Apollo program.